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Monday, December 21, 2015

Still no ‘White Smoke’: MICHELLE KING WILL HEAD L.A. SCHOOLS AS THE SEARCH FOR A SUPERINTENDENT CONTINUES

Howard Blume | Los Angeles Times | http://lat.ms/1PgnppV

Dec. 21, 2015::Ten days after Los Angeles schools Supt.
Ramon C. Cortines quietly slipped out of the district, his deputy, Michelle
King, is assuming the role until a permanent successor is selected, officials said.

The Board of Education had hoped to announce a new
superintendent Saturday, but emerged from a closed door, 13-hour session with
nothing settled.

Although the board took no official action, King will serve
as superintendent because she was the No. 2 administrator under Cortines, said
district general counsel David Holmquist.

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King is a candidate for the top job, but there is no
indication that her provisional promotion is either an endorsement or a sign
that she's out of the running.

Besides King, educators who are under consideration or who
have been recruited include Fremont Unified Supt. Jim Morris, a longtime L.A.
Unified senior administrator; San Francisco Supt. Richard Carranza; and
Miami-Dade County Supt. Alberto Carvalho, who has said publicly that he did not
want the L.A. job.

Other individuals have been under serious consideration as
well.

The school board has scheduled another meeting on the
selection of a superintendent for Jan. 5.

Late Saturday evening, after the meeting adjourned, board
President Steve Zimmer offered an upbeat view of the search process.

"The board is absolutely on track, working extremely
hard, and I am confident that we will be able to reach a decision within the
first month of the school year," Zimmer said. "And the conversations
are absolutely appropriate to the weight and significance of the decision.

"I am very proud of this board. Everyone has brought
their best selves and kept their best selves even through these marathon
sessions."

The board has held four lengthy meetings over the last seven
days as it tried to make its most important hire.

The choice of King, 54, to step in temporarily was no
surprise; she'd already become acting superintendent on Dec. 11, when Cortines
unofficially stepped aside. Cortines returned to duty three days later,
however, when district officials received a terrorist threat. The threat
prompted the cancellation of school for 640,000 students Tuesday, but turned
out to be a false alarm.

Cortines said in an interview last week that King, as acting
superintendent, had the authority to cancel schools, but that it also was
reasonable to bring him back to manage the crisis.

King did not respond to questions about the handling of the
incident, but she was one of three senior district leaders who had dealt with
the situation early on, along with school district police chief Steven
Zipperman and Zimmer, who received the email threat at 10 p.m. Monday.

When it became clear that local and federal law enforcement
officials were neither going to take charge nor give unequivocal guidance,
Cortines was called at 5 a.m. He said that it would be unfair to criticize his
L.A. Unified colleagues, but that he wished he'd been alerted sooner or perhaps
not at all.

Cortines also said he was comfortable with his actions even
though the threat proved a hoax.

With his retirement about to take full effect, the district
needs to establish a clear chain of command, said Dan Schnur, director of the
Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC.

"If they're not ready yet to name a permanent
replacement, the events of Tuesday morning made it clear that there is at least
a strong need to put an interim superintendent in place," Schnur said.

King has experience serving for short periods as acting
superintendent, especially when she worked under Cortines' predecessor, John
Deasy, who frequently went out of town for conferences and meetings.

Last week, she oversaw the staff presentation at a board
meeting over a sensitive topic: the temporary closing of two schools because of
a natural gas leak in the northwest San Fernando Valley.

In April 2014, she oversaw the early hours of the district's
emergency response when a bus carrying students on a college visit crashed in
Orland, killing 10, including one L.A. Unified student. Other district students
were injured.